Phenomenology and the social construction of gender

In philosophy, there’s a school of thought called phenomenology. Its central premise is that the way something appears or is experienced is always mediated in relation to other things. It’s a way of understanding the world that moves away from essentialism and towards existentialism and intersubjectivity. For example, a phenomenological approach to understanding consciousness is that the self does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in relation to objects that give rise to our experience of the self. You can’t be conscious without being conscious of something. If you look at something in front of you, you perceive it and are therefore conscious of it, and there’s always something for you to perceive. You can’t take your consciousness out of this relationship.

To understand how phenomenology is anti-essentialist, try this out: Think of a bird. You’re probably thinking of a creature with feathers and a beak and two wings. This creature, when you see it in your head, is your experience of what a bird is—but what is it that makes it a bird? A bird’s being as a bird—the category we place it in and the meanings we associate with it—doesn’t exist outside of our relationship with it. It’s a bird because we categorize it as a bird. We might change—expand or narrow down—the definition, collect more empirical data to refine what makes a bird a bird, but ultimately, a bird’s being as a bird exists because we’ve called it a bird. So even though the bird is real, phenomenology lets us see that our experience of it is always mediated by our relationship with it.

It’s often said that gender is performative. This is sometimes understood to mean that gender isn’t real. But that’s not what performativity means. What it means is that something develops meaning through a social practice that creates its meaning. A bird is a bird because we call it a bird. The meaning we give it—its being as a bird—arises out of our constantly calling it a bird. This doesn’t deny the existence of the creature, but how we experience it is inherently mediated through the social practice of our calling it a bird. You can’t think of a bird without calling it a bird, but your calling it a bird is a result of your learning that this creature is called a bird. So a bird is a social construct—not because you’ve constructed the creature, but because what makes you call it a bird, what gives it its meaning as a bird, is a social construct. A bird can’t exist in your head without this construct. In the same way, gender is performative—not because it isn’t real, but because it’s always mediated through the meaning we give it.

I often come across the question, “Would you be nonbinary if the binary genders weren’t so narrow?” But this question is misleading. It’s like asking if a bird would still be a bird if we stopped calling it a bird, with the implication that a bird would cease to exist if we stopped calling it a bird, or it would transform into something else, as if if we called it a human instead of a bird, it would magically grow human feet and a human body and its wings would fall off.

If the definitions of the binary genders expanded to include my experience, I would obviously become a binary gender—that’s a truism. And it’s ultimately meaningless. Because my experience of myself wouldn’t change. The only thing that would change would be that the language of gender would’ve been performed differently to include my experience in the meaning of a binary gender.

This doesn’t mean that being nonbinary isn’t real. Because gender is inherently mediated. There is no unmediated gender. A man is a man the same way a bird is a bird. The person exists, but we’re the ones who call this person a man. So a man is a social construct—not because we’ve constructed the person, but because what makes you call the person a man, what gives him his meaning as a man, is a social construct. And our perception of this person is inherently mediated through our construction of the meaning we’ve given him. Likewise, being nonbinary is a social construct—not because being nonbinary isn’t real, but because what we experience as nonbinariness is mediated through how binariness is performed. Calling myself nonbinary isn’t an essentialist statement about myself. I use the label as a word that helps me understand myself and communicate this understanding to others given the way gender is performed in the social context that I live in.

What makes this understanding of gender really cool is that once we recognize that gender doesn’t have an essence—that it’s mediated through how we perform it—we realize that we can redefine gender however we want. The meaning of gender can be reconstructed by simply changing the way we perform it. Trans men are men and trans women are women because we say they are, and there’s nothing more to manhood and womanhood than that.

This understanding of reality is liberatory. It makes us active participants in the shaping of our reality. It makes us realize that reality isn’t something that’s imposed on us, but rather something we can play with, something we create and recreate.